Nabuo Nakagawa is considered one of the defining figures of Japanese Horror cinema and perhaps its first real master, although he’s not as well-known as many who followed him. Masaki Kobayashi would give the genre international attention with his famous Kwaidan (1964), and that film, along with Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968) have become common touchstones for any genre fan looking beyond the bastions of Hollywood and Europe. The explosion of the specific national genre’s popularity in the late 1990s, as it became known as “J-Horror,” would make directors like Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takashi Miike, and Hideo Nakata famous. The Kyoto-born Nakagawa, who had an interest in social realist writing when he was younger, wrote some amateur film criticism that gained him attention, before he started working at Makino Film Productions. That studio went bankrupt in 1932, but Nakagawa had gained experience as an assistant director and made his debut as a director proper on the 1934 film Yumiya Hachiman Ken. Nakagawa weathered World War II at Toho directing comedies, but he only began to truly define himself as a filmmaker with a specific outlook after the war, as he turned to noir tales and then horror movies when he moved to Shintoho. Nakagawa soon revealed a particular talent for uniting supernatural motifs found in Japanese folklore and mythology with the more familiar genre forms of western horror literature and film.

Nakagawa shared distinct traits with his major western counterparts of the same period, Terence Fisher, Mario Bava, and Roger Corman. Like them he developed an intensely atmospheric visual style, and tried to invest horror cinema with new aesthetic force and style to fit in with an era of widescreen and blazing colour. Some of his works, like Vampire Girl (1959), betray layers of fascinating if not always successful effort to unite the genre lexicons of east and west, trying to assimilate the traditional European idea of the vampire figure by calling back to the troubled history of Christianity trying to take root in Japan, blended with a mishmash of gothic horror tropes. Perhaps Nakagawa’s best-known work is his startling 1960 epic Jigoku. Nakagawa had conceived of Jigoku as the ultimate statement on his regular theme of karmic retribution, and, after several years of making movies at the familiar breakneck pace required of a Japanese genre filmmaker, he cut back on his output to concentrate on it. Jigoku proved to be the last release of Shintoho, which collapsed soon after, leaving Nakagawa to wander from studio to studio, only able to complete sporadic projects.

Jigoku saw the director mediating his own career progression in his approach, starting off with a relatively modest portrait of ordinary characters that shades into a tale of guilty deceptions and crimes, resulting in a mass poisoning, whereupon the film radically shifts style as the dead characters are thrust into Jigoku – the Japanese Buddhist concept of hell – to be cruelly and gruesomely tortured for their sins. Nakagawa took liberal advantage of one freedom his foreign rivals didn’t have, a relatively lax censorship regime in Japan when it came to gore, and so the climax of Jigoku is a startling succession of bloody and nightmarish images no western filmmaker would dare for quite a few years yet. Of the movies Nakagawa made in the years before Jigoku, two of the best are Black Cat Mansion and The Ghost of Yotsuya. Black Cat Mansion is the more generic-feeling of the two, and yet it’s still marked by some unique visual and structural tricks, as well as the richness of its cultural grounding. The opening sequence strikes a deliciously eerie mood as Nakagawa’s camera explores a hospital at night during a blackout, a torch picking out a path through the dark corridors and up flights of stairs. Sights like a dead man being wheeled along a corridor by masked and gowned orderlies are charged with morbid and numinous import.

A doctor on duty, Dr. Tetsuichiro Kuzumi (Toshio Hosokawa), sits in a pool of candlelight and listens uneasily to the sound of footsteps as he waits for the lights to come on again. He drifts into a reverie, recalling a time a few years earlier when his wife Yoriko (Yuriko Ejima) was stricken with tuberculosis. Tetsuichiro abandoned his practice in Tokyo and moved with Yoriko back to Kyushu, where she and her family came from, to give her a chance to recover. Yoriko’s brother Kenichi (Hiroaki Kurahashi) arranged for them to move into a long-abandoned, rundown manor house, a place once called Spiraea Mansion for the flowers that used to grow in its yard. Weird signs begin proliferating even on the road to the mansion, as Kenichi has to swerve to avoid hitting a black cat on the road, almost crashing through a protective barrier into the sea. The mansion, once they reach it, looks like a place the Addams Family would delight in occupying, with great, stout wooden doors in the perimeter wall. The yard is overgrown and fetid, whilst the interior proves dirty and dilapidated, with a stain on the wall Yoriko takes for blood, and footprints in the dust that suggest someone’s been roaming the house barefoot. Yoriko spots an old woman with long, white hair within the old servants’ block. She calls Tetsuichiro and Kenichi back to check out the stranger, but the crone proves to have vanished when they look in.

Despite the initially distressing impression, the Kuzumis renovate and repair the house as a comfortable abode and convert part of it into a modern clinic so Tetsuichiro can continue practicing whilst Yoriko recuperates. The barefoot old woman is seen again, disturbing the family dog Taro and approaching Tetsuichiro’s assistant (Akiko Mie) like a patient. Whilst the assistant fetches the doctor, the crone infiltrates Yoriko’s room and tries to throttle her, but dashes away as her husband and his assistant return. During the night, Yoriko is scared the crone will return, despite Tetsuichiro’s assurances, and then her husband is called away to see a patient. With Tetsuichiro gone the crone reappears, kills Taro, and again tries to strangle Yoriko. Realising he’s been lured away, Tetsuichiro speeds home and manages again to intervene in time. The next day Tetsuichiro and Kenichi visit a Buddhist priest to try and learn what’s going on. The priest begins recounting the tragic history of the mansion.

From the opening in the hospital, Black Cat Mansion displays Nakagawa’s gifts for generating a carefully cordoned atmosphere. His roots as an artist interested in everyday people and problems meshed intelligibly with his gift for portraying the bizarre and the grotesque, because he saw clearly how they relate. The worst horrors in his cinema always stem from some profane mix of greed, lust, and faithlessness, and the supernatural is only ever a marker for the lingering toxicity of human violence. The narrative structure employs three different layers of flashback, and each step backwards invokes a different understanding of the story. The Kozumis’ relationship is straightforward, caring husband and sickly wife, with the ghost woman’s stalking presence actualising the way disease is eating into Yoriko. But it also reads lucidly as a story about the post-war recovery, as modern Japan tries to reorientate itself and get back on its feet but has to contend with the lingering ills of a vicious and iniquitous feudal past, which becomes the setting for the second layer of flashback. The framing of the story in the modern hospital sees a clean and modern environment, symbol of the restoration of a fully functioning and modernised society, suddenly claimed again by dark forces, and the pensive memory of a carer.

Nakagawa’s ardour for extended, sensuously evocative tracking shots is quickly evinced in the opening where the camera creeps through the hospital corridors. Equally apparent is his penchant for shots composed along rigid lateral lines that suit his widescreen compositions and convey a sense of space that’s cage-like – a design flourish he’d taken further in The Ghost of Yotsuya. In one great shot Yoriko is glimpsed lying on her convalescing couch, the evil intruder slowly rising into the frame behind her to one side. Nakagawa’s key stylistic choice for Black Cat Mansion was similar to Otto Preminger’s in Bonjour Tristesse, made in the same year, inverting the common technique of filming flashbacks in black-and-white to convey a remembered texture. Here the modern sequences are shot in a faintly blue-tinted monochrome, replete with touches of stark expressionism, whilst the flashbacks to the distant past are shot in bright colour. The splendidly squalid decay of the mansion as the contemporary couple enter it, with black crows crowding onto twisted, denuded tree branches, and footprints clear in the dusty halls, ushering the viewer into a peculiarly Japanese take on the familiar old dark house drama. Backdrops are painted in as squiggles of skeletal black.

When the film shifts into a period vision, everything looks like a classical scroll painting where the serenely logical interface of black and white Go stones is daubed with glistening red blood. The contrast seems to set a glum and menacing present day in tension with the lush splendour of a bygone age, but this proves to be a purposeful miscue, as any romantic sentimentality about the past is lethally put down in the course of the historical narrative with a lethal efficiency Nakagawa’s cynical counterparts in the jidai geki style like Kenji Mizoguchi or Kihachi Okamoto would’ve been proud of. Nakagawa’s films engage most of the images and motifs that would resound in J-horror’s later popular heyday, like female wraiths with long, face-concealing hair, and terrifying and deadly manifestations of demonic entities punishing offences. Like western ghost stories, the Japanese kind envisions haunting and supernatural manifestation as a totemic marker for crimes and tragic events, perpetually affixing a space with a sense of portent, but with a slipperier, less predictable sense of the mutable boundary between the earthly and the mystical, filled with perverse transformations and manifestations, with an added aspect of karmic retribution dogging malefactors until they pay for their villainies.

Black Cat Mansion also involves a brand of animism inherent in a lot of Japanese folklore, which holds cats as creatures with manifold supernatural powers and avatars for potent spirits. In Buddhist lore cats were considered generally evil, whilst the local Japanese traditions often saw them as playful and protective, a tension of tradition that Nakagawa cleverly negotiates as the cause of the haunting emerges. Nakagawa might have taken some inspiration from Kuniyoshi Utagawa’s ukiyo-e artwork “Okabe” (“The Cat Witch”) which portrayed the common traditional folklore of cat spirits manifesting in either animal form or as a stooped and withered old hag, glimpsed threatening a young woman seeking shelter in a temple. This is applied to a sort of werewolf story. The historical narrative, which occupies about half the film, concerns the master of the Spiraea Mansion in the late 1500s, Lord Shogen (Takashi Wada), a man with an almost lunatic temper and paranoia both stoked and left unchecked because of his great power. On the day he’s to meet and play a young Go master, Kokingo (Ryûzaburô Nakamura), Shogen gets worked up to a pitch of homicidal fury because Kokingo arrives late.

The Lord chases after and almost kills his loyal servant Saheiji (Rei Ishikawa), only sparing him because Shogen’s son Shinnojo (Arata Shibata) begs him to. Kokingo is advised to tread carefully during his match with Shogen, but after the Lord postures as an experienced player only to keep making rushed mistakes and trying to violate the rules, Kokingo berates him. Shogen promptly and repeatedly slashes Kokingo to death with his katana. He gets Saheiji to help him conceal the crime and tell Kokingo’s wife Lady Miyaji (Fumiko Miyata) that her husband, shamed by losing to the Lord, has gone off to study in private. Miyaji is visited by her husband’s ghost, however, leaving a bloodstained robe with Shogen’s crest on it, and Miyaji grasps the truth. She visits Shogen in his rooms to accuse him, but the Lord barely seems to notice, sparked instead by his delight in her beauty to rape her. Miyaji performs seppuku, after praying that her and Kikongo’s beloved cat Tama will lap up her blood and become a spirit of wrath cursing all the members of Shogen’s household to the end of their bloodlines: Yoriko and Kenichi are descendants of Saheji.

Nakagawa’s portrait of Shogen as a man already close to totally unhinged under the influence of aristocratic privilege borders on black comedy in the degree of his outrageous and utterly unchecked licence, mixed with a tint of the pathetic. Shogen’s demands to take his moves back during his match with Kokingo, his enraged, murderous pursuit of his servant, and his brutal rapes of both Miyaji and his son’s would-be fiancé Yae (Noriko Kitazawa), all have the quality of a greedy, vain, monstrous boy despite his advanced age. His supernatural torment only has to push him a little way to drive him wild enough to lay waste to everything around him. First the bloodthirsty cat spirit Miyaji unleashes takes possession of her form and then attacks Shogen’s blind, elderly mother (Fujie Satsuki), taking control of her form and using it to attack the others in the household. Meanwhile blood keeps leaking from the wall of Shogen’s room, and he keeps seeing the spectral figure of Kikogen with a bloody gash to his face and Miyaji. After Shinnojo reports seeing his grandmother active and fully-sighted, catching fish from the mansion’s pond, Shogen realises the truth and tries to kill the cat demon with Sahieji’s help, but she flees. Slashing madly at the shades tormenting him, Shogen accidentally slays Yae and attacks his son; forced to defend himself, Shinnojo finishes up stabbing his father but takes a fatal wound himself.

There’s a bit of accidental humour value in the cat demon when it comes into focus at last, ears sprouting to attention as it springs to battle off Shogen, but there are some vivid, more consciously humour-laced touches, like glimpses of the creature licking its slashed arm and licking milk from a saucer in silhouette. There’s also more deliberate humour in the way the demon unleashes telekinetic powers to force victims and foes to spin about, contort, and flip around: the demon has the ability to literally treat people like puppets in the same way Shogen has a socially prescribed right to. The climactic sequences of Shogen’s madness approach the outskirts of psychedelia a few years early as the hovering visages of the ghosts frame Shogen thrashing around, dazzling colours projected upon him, representing his descent into utter delirium. The bold redness of the bloody blotch leaking from his wall contrasts the sickly pale-green hue of the ghostly Miyaji’s face. The return to the present, as the priest finishes recounting the legend, restores the film to its monochrome look. The priest gives Tetsuichiro some written prayers to pin around the mansion to ward off the demon, but during the night the wind rises and dislodges one. When her husband goes out to fix some shutters, the demon appears in Yoriko’s room, stark white mane of hair and thrusting fingers electric against the darkness, and again starts strangling her.

When Tetsuichiro returns he finds his wife sprawled and apparently dead, whilst a patch of the plaster on the wall crumbles and reveals the long-hidden secret of Shogen’s crime: Kokingo’s skeleton, caked in dry, black, rotting flesh. The demon dissolves into the wall and the skeleton slowly keels over amidst a shower of debris. Nakagawa dissolves back to the present-tense with Tetsuichiro in the hospital. The lights come on, the source of the footsteps that creeped him out proves to be Yoriko, not only not dead but entirely well, bringing him food. Tetsuichiro muses on how burying Kokingo’s remains finally laid the demon to rest, and they couple find a small kitten they decide to adopt. As a happy ending this isn’t unwelcome, and it makes perfect sense in underlining the return to the present as a statement about the national recovery. But it’s still deployed in a jarringly breezy and hasty manner. The following year, Nakagawa would apply some of the stylistic and storytelling methods he had mastered on Black Cat Mansion and other films to a more hallowed and officially elevated subject. The Ghost of Yotsuya took on a very popular property for filmmakers at the time, as a version of Nanboku Tsuruya’s famous kabuki play Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan, which was also tackled over the years by respected directors like Keisuke Kinoshita and Shiro Toyoda, but Nakagawa’s is by and large regarded as the best.

The popularity of Tsuruya’s work as a basis for horror films in the post-war era might well be put down to how it deals with guilt, responsibility, and awful memory, describing the mournful figure of a wife left to her own devices, by a warrior whose tunnel-visioned sense of the world is soon overwhelmed by the memories of atrocities committed in the name of servicing his demanded right to glory and enrichment. Such a tale offered a framework for commentary on the lingering phantoms of World War II and the post-war world, as the pursuit of money and success became increasingly compulsive as a way of avoiding such introspection. Kinoshita’s 1949 version rendered the ghosts purely psychological, partly because it needed to negotiate the occupation era’s ban on historical irrationalism. As a story it has close similarities to the “Black Hair” tale that comprised the first chapter of Kwaidan. Again, Nakagawa takes pains to root the drama in an entirely worldly sense of human folly before anything like the uncanny intrudes, and indeed for much of its length The Ghost of Yotsuya is essentially samurai noir, Double Indemnity (1944) with kimonos and katanas.

Nakagawa stages the crucial opening all in one, long, decorous tracking shot, with a trio of figures walking homewards at night by lantern light, orange orb floating before a stark, shadow-cast wall. Into the frame dashes Iemon Tamiya (Shigeru Amachi), a young and ambitious but penniless samurai who wants to marry the daughter of the respected elder Samo (Shinjirō Asano). Samo is contemptuous of Iemon, however, and brusquely refuses his request, infuriating Iemon so terribly that the young man draws his sword and slays Samo and his friend Sato. The third man, the lantern carrier Naosuke (Shuntarō Emi), isn’t terribly concerned about his boss’s death, and agrees to help Iemon in covering up his deed. Iemon and Naosuke tell Samo’s daughters Oiwa (Katsuko Wakasugi) and Sode (Kitazawa again) that their father was slain by the bandit Usaburo (Yôzô Takamura), who had a grudge against Samo for slashing his face for a transgression. Iemon and Naosuke pledge to help the sisters and Sato’s son Yomoshichi (Ryūzaburō Nakamura) track down and kill Usaburo, but they ambush Yomoshichi, stab him, and toss him over a waterfall whilst on the hunt for the bandit: Naosuke has a passion for Sode, and Iemon’s complicity in getting him out of the picture was the price of his silence.

A couple of years kater, however, nothing’s going right. Both Iemon and Oiwa and Naosuke and Sode are living in Edo, trapped in dire poverty as Iemon can’t get a position, and he and Oiwa have a small, wailing baby. Sode, who hates Naosuke but is nonetheless tied to him, has managed to keep him from marrying her so far because he promised not to until the revenge was complete. Whilst his marriage to Oiwa slides into abuse and loathing, Iemon protects some young ladies he encounters in the streets from some hoods, impressing their father Itō (Hiroshi Hayashi) so much he wants Iemon to marry his eldest daughter, Ume (Junko Ikeuchi). Naosuke, seeing an opportunity, earns money from Itō by conspiring to finish off Iemon and Oiwa’s marriage, and eventually he talks Iemon into poisoning Oiwa and setting things up so that it looks like she was justly slain for being caught in infidelity with her good-natured masseur, Takuetsu (Jun Ōtomo).

Black Cat Mansion revealed the similarity to English Shakespearean and Jacobean drama in Nakagawa’s take on his native tragic mode, with evildoers dogged by ghosts representing their interior boles of guilt and trauma, and the similarity of the traditions is even more noticeable in The Ghost of Yotsuya. Nakagawa makes Iemon an antiheroic character reminiscent of the protagonist of An American Tragedy, ensnared by his own blend of desperate aspiration and emotional weakness which manifests ironically in acts of effective violence. The spasm of homicidal anger he turns upon Samo and Sato is easy to understand and even justified to a certain extent by the samurai code of honour, as he’s been humiliated and belittled, but also confirms Samo’s low opinion of his character, attacking unarmed men because he can’t control his temper. Naosuke serves as helpmate and conspirator in Iemon’s crimes, but also embodies his baser self, containing and reflecting his darkest instincts, in a manner close to the symbolic characters of morality plays. The doubling of the sisters Oiwa and Sode also proves consequential as Sode maintains a certain strength of character and sufficiency her sister pathetically loses in trying to play the perfect wife to Iemon, as Sode fends off Naosuke’s advances and tries to make him hold to his promise to avenge her father, and eventually even takes up the sword to try and avenge her family.

Nakagawa’s adaptation of the play sheared off many complications and subplots, making Iemon’s role in Oiwa’s death more direct as he agrees to using a poison on Oiwa that disfigures her terribly and then kills her. Oiwa’s drawn-out death scenes are wrenching and pathetic as she beholds her gnarled and scarred features in a mirror, forced to wear the mask of bottomless corruption and horror that is her husband’s life like a living Dorian Gray portrait: the operatic cruelty reaches its finest pitch as Oiwa tries to brush her hair and tears a great chunk of skin with the hair attached from her scalp. Unable to believe the way she’s been repaid for being everything required as wife to her husband, Oiwa in her distraught state she stabs her baby rather than leave it to be raised by a man like Iemon. The gormless Takuetsu, who at least has the decency to desist when he realises that Oiwa doesn’t want him as a lover, becomes another victim as Iemon attacks him, hacking off an arm and stalking after him to deliver the coup-de-grace. Nakagawa pans from a shot of a filthy patch of swamp where frogs chirp away over to the Iemon house where Takuetsu writhes in his death throes, and intercuts erupting fireworks as communal celebrations go on in the world beyond, with the grim business of nailing Takuetsu and Oiwa to a shutter to weight them down before dumping them in the swamp.

At times The Ghost of Yotsuya feels like a ruthless parody of Hiroshi Inagaki’s Miyamoto Musashi trilogy, or at least an incidental inversion of its precepts and those of many other works in the jidai geki, countering the romantic sprawl of Inagaki’s historical Japan and celebration of the warrior ethic as a pure way of living, with a squalid portrait of pride versus poverty and hyperbolic cruelty turned on the innocent, all shot in a similar palette of stylised colour. Iemon and Naosuke’s assault on Yomoshichi, where they stab him under the arm and hurl him over a waterfall, in particular feels like a mockery of the constant use of waterfalls as a visual and thematic refrain in Inogaki’s trilogy: the swamp where corpses are sunk and ghouls arise becomes the true mimetic landscape thereafter. Sources of grace are in very short supply in Nakagawa’s survey, but wellsprings of shame and fear plentiful. As opposed to Black Cat Mansion’s Shogen, who was an avatar for unchecked power and predation that infantilises its wielder, The Ghost of Yotsuya offers Iemon as a man who practices cruel and expedient violence and deserves his comeuppance, but who is both more sympathetic and more culpable because he’s not a mindless thug or cold psychopath. He is rather a being who feels compelled to commit horrendous acts because it’s in the nature of the world to push him to such ends, not seeing any external, natural fount of order and justice to counter them.

Tsuruya’s story demonstrates belief that such a natural law does exist and claims its price, be it through corrosive psychological impact or haunting proper, and as Nakagawa would state even more forcefully in Jigoku, he held a similar faith. “I don’t expect you to know how I feel,” Iemon growls disconsolately at Naosuke when the other man celebrates the good fortune they’ve just bought in murder, as he seems to meditate in bewildered pain at how something he once wanted enough to kill for became something in itself to be euthanized. The Ghost of Yotsuya counts as one of the most elegantly sustained visual experiences in horror cinema, with Nakagawa working with his regular cinematographer Tadashi Nishimoto for a softly textured colour look that realises the inherent battle between a corrupt universe and the scant beacons of light and hope through a constant war of dark shadows, musty browns and greys, and patches of redemptive brightness. Nakagawa’s framings become increasingly obscured by a mesh of intrusive physical details. Household fixtures like the vertical bars on a balustrade constantly intruding into the frame. Interior drapings of gauze and cloth close in.

A sense of entrapment and smothering closeness dominates. During that long opening shot, Nakagawa’s camera takes up an attitude where a tree trunk looms between the pleading Iemon and the virulent Samo, a fatal and fateful division manifest between them. Naosuke’s slaying of the bandit Usaburo is staged in a small clearing amidst looming tree trunks, like great fingers squeezing in on them. Amachi would work again for Nakagawa in playing the undead lord in Vampire Girl, his fiercely angular features perfect for a Byronic demon lover figure, just as Nakagawa carried over the eye-catching Kitazawa from Black Cat Mansion. Some of the images Nakagawa had conjured for Black Cat Mansion recur in The Ghost of Yotsuya, particularly the terrorising visions of the mutilated dead that drive the wrongdoer into a frenzy, like Takuetsu’s apparition with a gory slashed face, as well as the key sequence in both films where the haunted killer lashes out at the shades assaulting him only to slay the living by mistake. Perhaps the best scare moment sees Iemon hearing Oiwa’s spectral voice and glancing around, not seeing her, and then suddenly looking up to behold her sprawled on the ceiling, moaning dire threats. Nakagawa cuts from the putrid reaches of the swamp where Iemon and Naosuke have disposed of the two corpses to the sight of Ume in her wedding regalia, a headdress of fanning white material about her face, a forceful alternation between muck and ritualised decorousness.

The film builds to an astonishingly beautiful passage as Oiwa’s ghost visits Sode, who doesn’t yet know she’s a shade, and leads her through a densely foggy night to the inn where Yomoshichi is staying, the two women drifting against a backdrop of dense fog past twisted trees and reeds, the lantern sign of the inn appearing as a solitary light hovering amidst the murk like a promise. Meanwhile Iemon is visited in his wedding bed after marrying Ume first by a squirming snake on the mosquito netting and then by ghosts that make him strike out wildly with his sword, only to realise as his vision clears that he’s slain his wife, father-in-law, and a servant. Iemon flees to a temple where he has monks pray for him, sitting in the centre of a prayer circle with a protective chain about him. When he dares venture out of the temple, he encounters Naosuke in the swamp who unthinkingly salvages a comb and robe from the water not realising they belonged to Oiwa, whilst Iemon sees Oiwa and Takuetsu’s bodies rising from the swamp to accuse him, driving him into a frenzy as the winds rise and the sun’s glow becomes an abstract sworl amidst rolling mist. Fleeing back to the temple still assailed by visions, Iemon is infuriated by Naosuke’s goading admonitions and his candour: “I’m impressed! The samurai is as much a villain as I am.”

Iemon promptly rises up and slays Naosuke. Nakagawa turns this into a surreal interlude as the floor of Iemon’s temple chamber becomes the swamp and Naosuke’s body falls beside Oiwa’s, infernal red glowing in the windows, before the scene returns to normal and Iemon is left stand over just Naosuke’s corpse. The relentless hounding of ghosts is not however enough to actually destroy Iemon. It is instead left to Yomoshichi and Sode, who attack Iemon in the temple with swords, bent on delivering revenge although Iemon’s still a fearsome fighter. They battle in the temple’s graveyard, an ideal zone of Japanese Gothic. Iemon flinching as the ghosts keep appearing to him as he fights, but after taking wounds at last impales himself on Sode’s sword, surrendering to his own death wish and succumbing with a repeated plea for Oiwa to forgive him. The last shots, of a calm, restored Oiwa holding her baby, in the mist at the temple gates, before the rising sun, suggesting if necessarily forgiveness for Iemon than at least peace for the restless dead.